Video remixing refers to the act of altering pre-existing media (particularly video and audio visual) content to create a new work. Often, video remixing involves the selection of different portions of pre-existing video and audio content, such as scenes from different movies, and recombining the portions to create a new work, referred to as a “remix.” These new works may be commercial in nature or may be performed to provide news or other commentary on the original works.
The standard video authoring process presents novice users with a number of obstacles. First, users must obtain some source media, usually by shooting it themselves or copying it from some other source such as DVD. The former requires a video camera and knowledge of how get the captured media onto a PC in an editable form, while the latter generally requires willingness to violate copyright law and knowledge of how to circumvent DRM systems. Assuming the user gets this far, the editing itself can be fairly straightforward using consumer-oriented editing software of the kind bundled with major operating systems. However once the creative process is complete, users often face a difficult technical process to share their edited media. This problem is akin to that faced by non-technical authors who wished to publicly share textual documents, before the advent of blogs. As a result of these obstacles, a relatively small number of computer users have actually had the experience of sharing video they have edited with others.
Despite this, video remixing has become a popular pastime and there are now many web sites devoted to distributing and commercializing video remixing. Many original works, and typically many specific scenes, often reappear in multiple remixes created by different users. For example, a particular scene because of its content, social relevance, and importance to popular culture may be used by many different users, in one form or another, in many different remixes created by unrelated users. These scenes and works are iconic to the users creating the remixes and therefore of particular relevance.
A need exists to be able to identify these iconic scenes and works for a number of reasons. For example, such works are potentially worth more than less iconic works, are sought after by the remixing community more than less iconic works, and, in addition, may provide feedback to the creators of the original works about the reasons behind the success of the original works.
It would be useful to be able to identify less popular segments and be able to categorize segments across the range of popularity. Such information may allow editors to avoid cliche in their remixes.